CVD - a stupid question & not so stupid questions

[Kevin Henry]

I know that CVD is basically SVCD with a resolution of 352*480/576.

My DVD-SA wont play SVCD but will play the xSVCD if i do the header trick. I'm doing DivX to xSVCD conversion with CCE 2.62/4.

Now, reading the article about CVD I thought I would try that out, but I have some questions that are probably just stupid of me ...

1. 352*480 is NTSC. Is that 'width*hieght' or 'hieght*width'? I think it's width*hieght, but that just doesnt make any sense! Will the player resize the video on playback like it does with xSVCD?

2. With the additional bitrate you gain, how do you set the bitrate for 3 pass VBR in CCE? Now, I'm using FitCD & adding 5% to get an almost 800mb xSVCD that burns nice.

3. When the original movie is 16:9 or 4:3 how does that affect what settings I should use? In TMPGEnc I'm basically just setting the size to encode at, right?

4. How can I use the script that FitCD creates in CCE? A link to a page with a 'how to' would be nice ...

Any help appreciated

[adam]

1) height, width- The horizontal resolution (352) will be stretched to fit your screen. What you end up seeing will be more like 640x480. It's the same way with SVCDs.

2) By decreasing the resolution you don't actually gain any bitrate. The amount of bitrate applied every second will be the same as if you had used 480x480. The difference is that you now have less pixels so that same bitrate will essentially go farther. So basically, if you use the same avg bitrate as a 480x480 SVCD then your CVD should have less artifacts and be higher quality overall. If you lower the avg bitrate than you "can" achieve a smaller file that is still roughly the same level of qualilty. So regardless of whether you are making a SVCD or a CVD just use a bitrate calculator to determine your avg bitrate.

3) In the advanced tab of TMPGenc you tell the encoder what the source aspect ratio is. It is important to give TMPGEnc the correct information here otherwise your aspect ratio in your encode may be off.

In the video tab you set the aspect ratio for output. Few dvd players correctly recognize the 16:9 flag in a SVCD so its generally best to just encode in 4:3 regardless of what aspect ratio your source is.

4) There's not much to it. Install avisynth, use fitcd to create an AVS file then load this AVS file in CCE.

[Kevin Henry]

ah, good thanks adam ... guess thats why you're a moderator